Rare Disease

An experimental drug for Alzheimer's disease sharply slowed the decline in mental function in a small clinical trial, researchers reported Friday, reviving hopes for an approach to therapy that until now has experienced repeated failures.

In it's report, "Clinical Cancer Advances 2015: ASCO's Annual Report on Progress Against Cancer," published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, 4 newly approved treatments for CLL were predicted to have a dramatic impact on patients with the disease.

The FDA has provided Emergency Use Authorization, a pre-approval for use in bad outbreaks, for Roche's new Ebola test, the LightMix Ebola Zaire rRT-PCR Test.

Results from a large phase 3 prospective randomized open-label trial, comparing imatinib 400 mg with dasatinib 100 mg daily, were presented by Stephen O'Brien, MD, professor of hematology, Newcastle University Medical School, Newcastle upon Tyne, England.

A poster session on the second day of the 56th annual meeting of the American Society of Hematology, held December 6-9, San Francisco, was dedicated to trials evaluating therapeutic options in chronic myelogenous leukemia. Data presented included safety, efficacy, managing comorbidities, and biological differences that drive response to therapy.

On the second day at the Annual Meeting of the American Society of Hematology 2014, Francois-Xavier Mahon, MD, PhD, Bordeaux Hospital, INSERM 1035, Bordeaux, France, shared the results from the European LeukemiaNet Stop TKI (EURO-SKI) study; the trial used tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKIs) in CML to define prognostic markers to increase the rate of patients in durable deep molecular response after stopping TKI.

Although there are no current cases of Ebola in the United States, an increased number of hospitals are now equipped to treat patients with the virus while minimizing risk to healthcare workers.

US officials trying to set up a network of hospitals in this country to care for Ebola patients are running into reluctance from facilities worried about steep costs, unwanted attention, and the possibility of scaring away other patients.

The leaders of the United Nations and the World Health Organization expressed renewed alarm on Friday about Ebola's tenacity in Africa and, in particular, its potential to ravage a fourth country, Mali, where they said hundreds of people had been exposed to an infected cleric who died last month.

Effective immediately, Karen B. DeSalvo, MD, MPH, will be stepping down as national coordinator for health information technology to assist HHS in the fight against Ebola.

While Ebola stokes public anxiety, more than 1 in six hospitals-including some top medical centers-are having trouble stamping out less exotic but sometimes deadly infections, federal records show.

The CDC has released guidelines with detailed information on the type of personal protective equipment and the procedure for donning and removing, for healthcare workers managing Ebola patients.

Brincidofovir is being developed by the company against several different viruses, including smallpox and Ebola.

Health officials from CDC and the state of Texas are reeling in the wake of today's report that a second nurse at the Texas hospital that treated Ebola patient Thomas Eric Duncan has tested positive for the virus. The news came while health leaders were still trying to determine how 26-year-old nurse Nina Pham contracted Ebola while caring for the first patient diagnosed with the disease on US soil. Meanwhile, the largest nurses' union says its members report that most hospitals are not ready for an Ebola patient.

If Congress had not pushed back the deadline for implementing ICD-10 last spring, the United States now would have a specific code for tracking Ebola, according to an infographic from the Coalition for ICD-10.

With the enormous amount of data being collected and entered into EHRs, the human brain (in this case the physician brain) is probably tuning out information that would probably stay if there was a conversation with the patient instead.

As Texas health officials monitor 80 people for symptoms of the Ebola virus, the question arises: could this public health threat have avoided if the ER at Texas Presbyterian admitted the patient with the disease when it first had the chance? Was the patient's insurance status an issue, as some have suggested?

For patients who develop infections while staying in a hospital, the chances of it becoming drug resistant increases 1% for each day of hospitalization, according to researchers from the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC).

The study, conducted in cynomolgus monkeys, explored several candidate vaccines from NIAID's preclinical services program.

The FDA, in a press release, has warned consumers to be aware of such products being sold online.

Specialty drugs expected to account for 40% of total prescription spending by 2016, according to Catamaran Corporation.

New research found that the risk of developing breast cancer increased in women who had mutations of a gene related to BRCA2, the PALB2 gene.

The World Health Organization declared an international public health emergency Friday over the Ebola outbreak in western Africa that has killed almost 1,000 people. The outbreak of the deadly virus is "extraordinary event" and a public health risk to other countries, it said.

The study, published in NEJM, proposes enhanced surveillance in women with PALB2 mutations, similar to women harboring BRCA2 mutations.

ABT-414 is being developed to treat glioblastoma multiforme.

In conjunction with provider-oriented payment reform, tools like VBID that change the focus from how much to how well we spend our healthcare dollars.

This spring as the feds have been drawing up new rules for the program, a pitched battle has broken out between hospitals and drug manufacturers who say the program, known as 340B, is now bloated and badly regulated.